Lighten my Darkness
by emeralddarkness
Summary: Just what was it like, locked away and waiting inside the puzzle for millennia…?


Lighten my Darkness  
emeralddarkness

**Rating:** PG  
**Summery:** Just what was it like, locked away and waiting inside the puzzle for millennia…?  
**Disclaimer:** Me? Own Yugioh? Ahahahahahahaha….

Having recently gone on a wild and crazy Yugioh binge, ideas for various different thingies keep on hitting me and NOT LEAVING ME ALONE. This was one of them – what was it _like_ in the puzzle? I've started about 4 different versions of this, all of them, like, way different. This was just a little drabble thing that I wrote in about half an hour and then which my good friend Rennie betaed for me – if not for her, trust me, it would not be nearly as good, nor nearly as long. It started out as this TINY little thing and then she said a few things that sparked my imagination and….

- - -

Forever the nameless spirit has been here, and forever he has been alone. There never was a time when there was anything more then simply the darkness, and the stone walls, and the cold chains. Ah, the darkness. Shadows pressing in close around him, twining around his legs like overly affectionate cats, licking with curling tendrils at his fingertips, rubbing alongside him, running their soft, papery, insubstantial fingers over his form.

They are his only companions – shadowy presences that are all that exist in this world besides him. They call him king – or not king, Pharaoh; more than a king, a god, _a god._ Of emptiness, of course, for what else is there to reign over, but still they pay their respects to him. Sometimes they seem frightened of him, cringing back to creep along the walls that are the boundaries of the world and hissing things that sound like they could have meaning; strange syllables falling from restless, constantly muttering mouths.

He no longer pays them much mind – he doesn't know what they say, and if he ever had the ability to understand them he has lost it now. He has almost forgotten how to speak, even his thoughts are losing any form of language that he might once have known somewhere in the forever he has been here – if, of course, he ever had it to begin with, if he is not simply creating memories from nothing. From the shadows, as is he.

In the end, it matters little.

There are chains, chains that bind him. They stretch on forever; they are all that exist in the world other than the stone walls. And while, at first, he fought against them he has by now long since given up his struggling. His bindings are unbreakable and inescapable – as eternal as the darkness that surrounds him. Why fight what cannot change? Nothing changes, so now he simply waits. The shadows, his companions, curl around his form and nibble at his sanity and what few fragments of memory remain to him. They break off in fragments – emotion, color, sensation; tiny pieces of his mind and sense of self, of his very _soul_, that are crumbling as surely as the walls around him crumble. It may be happening slowly – so very, very slowly – but the millennia do take their effect.

It does not matter, not really – he is darkness after all; a creature born of the dark who is meant to be kept a chained captive in the darkness from now until all eternity and meant to die in the darkness. There is nothing else, nor has there ever been. This world, made of darkness and cold stone and cold chains, is all that he has ever known and all that he will ever know and it is unchanging – only apathy and madness and the slow fall into decay can exist.

This too is a feeling that he is well accustomed to.

He almost feels as though he himself is stone, as though sometime in the eons past his form had collapsed into a type and shadow of the material that surrounds him, pressing in on all sides. He is not, but it matters little. He is not of the same stuff as his surroundings, but he might as well be. After all, if this is all that there is and ever will be, if he is meant to be here, then why should he chafe at his prison? And most of the time he doesn't; the apathy has sunk deep into his bones along with the uncaring and unchanging presence of this place; he has stopped even trying to move.

And yet at times it does seem hard. And then the very fact that he finds it so seems unnecessarily cruel to him – he is a creature of darkness, destined to be bound in chains at this spot until the very world ends; very well. Why must he be conscious of that fact? Why can he not simply become one with the ever present darkness and the unfeeling? Is it not enough that he is a prisoner here? But no; he has always been aware of his situation, and despite the tired acceptance he now feels when contemplating his existence he has never been able to consider it with peace. At first, of course, he raged against it but he could not move, and by now the apathy has sunk deep into his bones. After all, it does not matter in the end – it cannot affect his situation or his surroundings. Why even ask for change, for freedom? He lies bound in the center of all that is, he has long since accepted that. A world beyond this? A world outside the stone and the shadows? The very notion is ridiculous. There is nothing else, no more then there ever has been.

Until, impossibly, there suddenly is.

It had been an utterly unremarkable fragment of eternity when something first changed – he did not think of time in the divisions that he once had, before the darkness claimed him; hours and seconds, minutes and days… they meant nothing in the unchanging darkness that surrounded him. Time, after all, has no dominion in a place where everything is timeless, where the only mark of its passage is the gradual decay of the world. Nothing had ever happened before; there was darkness and there were the shadows and only the slight variations that were created by them and so some way to measure the time that had gone by, some way to chronicle it, was more then just a foreign concept – it was irrational, unnecessary. More, even, then that – the idea of measuring and marking the stuttering progression towards his final death seemed incomprehensible; ludicrous.

But in this small fragment, this bit of eternity, the impossible suddenly happened. A link in one of the many chains binding him had fractured, cracks spider-webbed silently across the surface like the advance of the nightly frost, and then crumbled. Broken, like a piece of glass that had been shattered, letting the shards of metal fall to the ground like so much trash.

He had been staring emptily into the darkness when it happened, the apathy that filled this space nearly overwhelming him – somewhat ironically, he could not truly sleep. There was something here that kept you eternally conscious of your surroundings, even if only dully so. The apathy, after all, made everything unimportant. It was, perhaps, one of the reasons that he did not struggle – why bother? Why did it matter, why should he care…?

He was unfocused, uncaring, as the shadows nuzzled against him affectionately… and then the spiraling cracks had appeared and the metal had fragmented. Had he not seen it himself he might not have believed it, but he had – although all was darkness in his prison, he had always been able to see. Not particularly well, perhaps – certainly he couldn't distinguish the detail on anything much further away then the rope of chains that was only a little distance from his face, but he had never much cared. Detail didn't seem particularly important now, though at first he could recall attempting to focus, to decipher them. It was impossible; the darkness obscured it. He could make out vaguely sketched outlines of his surroundings, if nothing more. It was enough. It had seemed strange to him that he could see at all, as there was no light here, but… well, at least he had that.

Still, the link of the chain was close enough for him to see it, to see the gradual fracturing that began to creep across the metallic surface. At first he didn't notice at all, and when he did he was sure that it was no more then his imagination. Nothing changed here and nothing ever could, so even thinking that the chain was beginning to break….

It wasn't, perhaps, until the link crumbled as though it had been made of clay instead of metal that he truly believed. And, when he did, his eyes flew all the way open in shock as he stared at the place that had once been a link of his chain and was now simply… nothing.

One link; only one link. It hadn't had any real affect on the chains themselves – the links were hooked together twice and thrice over, just one link would not break the pattern, and then the chains themselves were looped and braided in patterns that seemed crazily complicated – a Gordian knot that could not be cut by conventional means. A knot that would take nothing short of a miracle to loosen. Was that what was happening, a miracle? The notion seemed ludicrous, and yet…and yet,_a link had fallen_. It had not even made a noise as it fell – there was no noise here, it was smothered by the darkness and the shadows.

But.

Oh.

_A link had fallen._

Even muffled by the darkness, by the apathy, but the unchanging and unknowing that smothered him like a blanket, a _link had fallen._ He had seen it. A link of his chain had broken, and that was something that had never happened before.

An impressive accomplishment for a place where nothing ever happened and nothing ever changed.

It captured his interest; for the first time in ages something sparked his imagination, made him wonder what _would_ happen next. And, for what seemed a long while, there was nothing – funny, it had been a very long time since the slow drag of time had felt as though it was even a mild inconvenience, he couldn't remember the last time that he had ached to speed the flow of things. Why bother, when nothing changed?

But something had, and that changed _everything._

The fragments of eternity dragged on, and more changes came. Sometimes the time between was long, sometimes barely there at all, but always the change was slowly progressing – sometimes as slowly as molasses, sometimes at an almost vicious pace. Cold shards of unfeeling metal fell from his chains as links dissolved; sand crumbled from the dissolving walls. The shadows didn't like it – they hissed uneasily, pacing the room restlessly before once again returning to his side, almost as though they felt they had betrayed him and wished to make amends.

A new feeling; restlessness.

Previously he had not felt it – he had not felt anything, save it be the ever present apathy and the accompanying slow spiral into madness (for though it was a quiet sort of madness with nothing that changed and nothing he could do, madness it was and madness it would remain), but now there was restlessness also writhing in him – a tight, uncomfortable feeling but a feeling which made him feel more alive then he had for… for he didn't know how long. For surely if things were changing _now_ then they cannot have always been this way, and if they were changing_now_ then surely they would change further?

Previously, before the change, there had never been a time without the chains and could never be a time without the chains and so, despite the fact that there were times when he loathed the chill feel of them against his skin, they did not truly bother him. Now, however, that they had begun to break, he found himself beginning to actively fight against them, he found he had the strength to do so, something that he wouldn't have believed before, and the more of them that fell to pieces the more that he wanted to be free. And so the cycle continued: the further the chains loosened, the harder he fought against them. The walls crumbled around him as he fought the chains, but somehow this was not quite as significant as the fact that his chains were coming undone. The walls at times also seemed important, but there was nothing beyond them; this was the world. But while there might be nothing in the world outside his prison – no kind of world outside his prison – even the corners of the dark, cold room were different from the center, and to even be able to go _there…._

Ah, the elation the first time that he was able to properly _move,_ the frustration that he could not move _further._ In the edges of the room the shadows slunk, twisting around broken chains and muttering furtively and soundlessly. They spiraled close to him, brushed his face with insubstantial fingers in what seemed an attempt to get him to stop, to calm down, to let things settle back into the stone being he had been before, but he could not and would not. He turned the hot impatience, which he could still feel the apathy trying to gently draw from him until he had nothing left _again_, against the shadows. They would spiral away from him again, and he would struggle until the next came in an attempt to lure him back into the uncaring.

It mattered not.

The links of his chains broke, and the further that his bonds were loosened, the further he could move and the more he wanted. And the more he wanted, the more that the shadows would curl around him – restraining him, suffocating him, nuzzling his hair and running fingers down his arms. The further that they did so, the more of him fell into darkness, into shadows, into madness, though at this point it hardly seemed to matter – there was little enough of him left. It seemed a cruel paradox that it was only now, when he was trying to break free and perhaps had a hope to do so, that the shadows were actively fighting to keep him. After a short while at the beginning – when the world was created, he supposed, along with him and the shadows and the chains – when they had seemed curious, almost affectionate, they had only ever really _accepted_ him, paying only slightly more attention to him then they did to themselves or each other. But now that there seemed to be even the faint possibility of _freedom_, the chance that the chains might crumble and he would be _free_ – the chance that they might lose him, perhaps forever – now that he was focusing his will on escaping them, escaping the madness and the chains and the darkness, it was now that they fought him.

They didn't hurt him of course – they never hurt him, at times they actually cringed away as though he was the one who could hurt _them_. Instead, they _seduced_. They increased their whispering, their smothering affection, their feather soft touches that were a lure back to how things had been before – promises of release, _real_ release, not this mockery that he was currently striving for, promises of peace and of fading into nothingness, the promise that he would never have to feel anything, not ever again….

Sometimes, in the longer gaps between the Changes, they almost convinced him. They curled around him, covering him like a blanket, whispering of nothingness, of peace, of relaxed resistance, of the hopelessness of this wish for _freedom_.

The only thing that kept him from giving in to their promises was that he knew the shadows to be liars. Eons he had lain, bound in chains, and they had never _then_ given him the release that he had longed for, or longed for as much as he had been able to desire _anything_ back before the Changes began, the same thing that they were promising_now._

_Just a little longer,_ they whispered soundlessly, without words, brushing touches along his face and neck and shoulders, trailing fingers down his arms to his hands. _Just a little longer and you would have been free – come, we will show you, stop the change; stop trying to be something you cannot…._

It was so tempting to give in sometimes, but when he almost did they began to lose interest again.

No, they were liars. They could not give him what they promised; they never would be able to. The only way to escape from them was to ignore them and continue to strive against the bonds.

He fought.

He _raged_ to be free as the shackles and bindings fell away. And, after a while (even more unexpected) the room itself began to change in a more substantial way then the hairline cracks that crept up the walls and sand that slid and rained down the surface. Light began to show through the damaged walls, shining through the cracks and fractures – light that was, at first, so bright and alien and yet _glorious_ that had he been able to he would have screamed, both with pain and with joy.

An eternity in darkness, and suddenly there was light. It was so foreign, so unexpected, that it distracted him enough to keep him from fighting for what seemed a long time. And then, of course, there was yet more purpose, yet more fuel for his desperation for _freedom_ – was it possible that there was more beyond this place? That the world did not begin and end here? Or if it did, and the Light was the end of all, was it not worth it?

He felt that he would rather die in the glory of that light then continue to live, forever, unchanging and unfeeling in the darkness.

It took him a little while to notice the new feelings that had come with the light, feelings that he did not believe were his own. There were small uncertainties, small triumphs – bursts of pain, surprises and joys. And a new thought, one that seemed incredible. The presence of another being. _Another being?_ Not a shadow, the shadows shared the apathy that characterized this place as well as him. No, not a shadow – these new emotions, the foreign ones, were far too _alive_ for that. The bursts of emotion spiraled through the room, fueling his new impatience as well as other feelings.

He was triumphant himself at the triumphs he felt – at what the light felt, and let him share. He was impatient at any impatience that he felt, any break, any pause, and that impatience slowly building up into a silent scream. There was no sound here, as there had been no light.

How things change.

It was a long time sometimes, between the Changes, but always they came; always. And after the Changes end he has to go back to waiting, hoping that the Changes will begin again and continue until he is free.

And then suddenly, in one more fragment of forever, they begin pouring down like a river flowing over a waterfall. Links of his chains collapse into dust, walls crack and the light and the warmth come seeping through, the shadows gather around his form and keen as though they are afraid while metal shards drop like rain. It is almost strange – before the changes had always happened gradually, almost hesitantly, and now they are literally flooding in from all sides. Perhaps the Light – whoever or even whatever it is, the entity that is controlling these changes – has finally become as impatient as he is and decided to finish it. End it. End it – oh yes, please let it end, let it end_soon._ After eons – an endless eternity – that he has spent waiting finally it is coming to an end and finally he will be_free…._ And while before, before the Changes had begun, he might have quite easily been able to simply let time slip away, knowing that nothing could or would change, now that things had already changed so very much and so very quickly and he was _so close_ that if it didn't end; if this final chain wasn't broken, he would break. Surely he would break; there was only so much he could take, and to have come so very close to freedom and then have it casually pulled back again….

Yes, he would break in two and then the shadows would close in on him again and he would welcome them quite willingly were in not for the fact that he cannot die but how can he live, even in the uncaring state that he'd been in before, knowing how close he had once come….

Silently, wordlessly, he pleads to whoever is creating these changes – please release him, or kill him if they could not; if they would only free him then he would serve them in any way that he knew how-

There was only left. Only one more crack and surely the room will crumble, only one more chain broken and he'll finally be free.

And then, cruelly, it stops.

He wants to scream.

The Changes freeze, and panic and then despair flood the room Despair? No! He throws himself into struggling against the chain, the _only chain left and he is almost free-_

Hopeless, it is hopeless and he is hopeless and he is useless and won't even be allowed to _die…._ He was stupid to even delude himself – it is as he knew from the beginning. Born of darkness, and he was destined to be chained eternally in darkness and then finally to die in darkness, the Changes were only a cruel trick, mocking him and showing him what could never be-

And then… the feeling changes again. And finally, with a metallic click that is somehow both faint and sharp as a razor blade at the same time, a sound that he seems to more feel then hear, be it with mind or ears, the final chain snaps – crumbles, collapses to dust – as the entire world dissolves.

Into the Light.

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Review plz?


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